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Can your bug tracker and support tickets be the same system?

I often see developers, both open source and proprietary, struggle with trying to use bug trackers as support tools (or sometimes support tools as bug trackers). I can see the appeal, since support issues often tie back to bugs and it’s simpler to have one thing than two. But the problem is that they’re really not the same thing, and I’m not sure there’s a tool that does both well.

In 2014 (which is when I originally added this idea to my to-do list according to Trello), Daniel Pocock wrote a blog post that addresses this issue. Daniel examined several different tools in this space and looked at trends and open questions.

My own opinions are colored by a few different things. First, I think about a former employer. The company originally used FogBugz for both bug tracking and customer support (via email). By the time I joined, the developers had largely moved off FogBugz for bug tracking, leaving us using what was largely designed as a bug tracker for our customer support efforts. Since customers largely interacted via email, it didn’t particularly matter what the system was.

On the other hand, because it was designed as a bug tracker, it lacked some of the features we wanted from a customer support tool. Customers couldn’t log in and view dashboards, so we had to manually build the reports they wanted and send them via email. And we couldn’t easily build a knowledge base into it, which reduced the ability for customers to get answers themselves more quickly. Shortly before I changed jobs, we began the process of moving to ZenDesk, which provided the features we needed.

The other experience that drove this was serving as a “bug concierge” on an open source project I used to be active in. Most of the user support happened via mailing list, and occasionally a legitimate bug would be discovered. The project’s Trac instance required the project team to create an account. Since I already had an account, I’d often file bugs on behalf of people. I also filed bugs in Fedora’s bugzilla instance when the issue was with the Fedora package specifically.

What I took away from these experiences is that bug trackers that are useful to developers are rarely useful to end users. Developers (or their managers) benefit from having a lot of metadata that can be used to filter and report on issues. But a large number of fields to fill in can overwhelm users. They want to be able to say what’s wrong and be told how to fix it.

In order for a tool to work as both a bug tracker and ticket system, the metadata should probably only be visible to developers. And the better solution is probably separate tools that integrate with each other.